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Kids on their own in Calais – the tip of an iceberg-cold world

24 October 2016. A World to Win News Service. Some eight to ten thousand refugees have been living in an improvised camp in Calais currently being demolished by French officials. All they’ve gotten from the French government so far has been tear gas and the bulldozers set to tear down the tents and shacks where they have survived amid the cold and mud thanks to the help of fellow refugees and humanitarian volunteers and organizations. The NGO Help Refugees said that as of 24 October it had a list of 1,028 “unaccompanied” children in the camp, 49 under the age of 13, one an 8-year-old boy. These are kids who lost their families at home, or were separated from them as they travelled across half the world through the most difficult and dangerous conditions imaginable.

Many of these children – about 40 percent, according to the NGO Terre d’Asile – came to Calais, on the English Channel, because they have family in the UK and are therefore legally entitled to asylum there. During the first ten months of this year, under public pressure, the UK admitted a grand total of 79. This came only after an enormous outcry from many British people. A Parliamentary measure to admit all refugees under 13, sponsored by a prominent member of the House of Lords, who had himself been given asylum in the UK as a 6-year-old fleeing the Nazi persecution of Jews, went largely ignored until the last week, when the British authorities finally let in 200 more. It took a strong protest from the British Dental Association to stop plans to x-ray the teeth of children claiming asylum to prove their age. Many other refugees in Calais are entitled to enter the UK because they have a spouse or other close relative to live with there, but neither the British nor French governments care to implement European Union laws and agreements.

This is, in fact, official UK government policy. Prime Minister Theresa May was infamous for her rabidly anti-foreigner positions when she was Home Minister. She took the lead among her European counterparts in cutting off funding to Italian-led search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean, calling saving lives a “pull factor” for “threats we face”.

When the French police attacked and destroyed about half the Calais camp earlier this year, 129 children simply went missing. A Help Refugees spokeswoman says she fears this will happen again, since no government will take responsibility for these children. One reason that many people do not want to leave the camp is that they have built up ties, mutual-help networks and other arrangements that enable them to survive. They have no reason to believe that the French and other authorities who have displayed nothing but alternating neglect and brutality will offer an acceptable solution to their predicament. These kids reached Calais after travelling through many other countries whose governments were no more welcoming than France.

What will happen to these refugees when their camp is bulldozed? The plan is for them to be herded into buses, split up into small groups and sent to hundreds of “welcome centres” scattered across the country. Five of these centres have already been fire-bombed. Right now there are about 500 media people in Calais – NGO members say they fear that when the camera lights go out, refugees who have refused to get on a bus “voluntarily” will be attacked by security forces or the small fascist bands that a thousand police mysteriously cannot hold back sometimes.

The biggest nationality group in the camp is people from Afghanistan, who literally crossed mountains and deserts to flee the mess the US and Nato made of their country. Under a recent agreement with the Western powers, the Afghan government is to accept the forcible return of its refugees in Europe, as many as hundreds of thousands. Ethiopians (whose government is closely allied with the US), Eritreans and other Africans are not generally considered deserving of refugee status. Trying to get by as an “illegal” immigrant is the most rational choice for many people, rather than applying for asylum, getting fingerprinted and maybe expelled. Some people have come to Calais seeking safety in numbers after being forced out of smaller camps in Paris and elsewhere.

The refugees in Calais are not just some unfortunate anomaly, an exception that proves the rule that the world is OK. Their desperate presence tells the truth about an unacceptable world dominated by a handful of countries that have prospered at the expense of the vast majority of the planet’s people, through both plunder and war, and the normal workings of a global system of exploitation. The fact that there are, according to the UN, 63.5 million refugees and displaced people in today’s world is an irrefutable proof – only one of too many – that the capitalist-imperialist system does not work for humanity and the planet.

While the British, French and other European governments squabble among themselves about who should help which immigrants, each taking in as few as possible as slowly as possible, some people not only refuse to accept this inhumanity but are taking responsibility to do something about it. A middle-aged, middle-class woman in the French city of Nice, near Italy, heard on her car radio that French police were blocking the city’s train station to keep out refugees who had walked across the border. She dropped her daily schedule, went to the station, invited refugees into her car and drove them to train stations where the police would not be expecting them. Someone snitched on her and she was arrested and hit with a huge fine. Overnight hundreds of people sent her enough money to pay it. A New York Times article refers to “a French underground railroad, moving African migrants”. While lots of “citizen collaborators tip off the French police”, “a low-key network of citizen smugglers are countering police efforts in a quasi-clandestine resistance, angered by what they see as the French government’s inhumane response to the crisis”. (4 October 2016) The “migrant crisis” that governments today consider a police problem could become part of a political crisis, with big questions at stake about what kind of society people want, or will accept.

What do the imperialists, fighting amongst themselves to run this world, mean by the words “migrant crisis”? For them, what creates a “crisis” is that a few people have slipped into Europe, the UK, the US, Australia and other imperialist fortresses. To promote racism, they call the Calais camp “the jungle,” when it is their capitalist system that has turned our planet into the dog-eat-dog place it is today. The real crisis is not Calais but the world. The system’s own workings are generating vast upheavals that no wall can hold back, and that cry out for the overthrow of this system in country after country.
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Editorial:

Introducing a transformed AWTWNS

14 March 2017. A World to Win News Service. With great joy, the editors of A World To Win News Service announce its transformation into a more thorough-going tool for revolution based on Bob Avakian's new synthesis of communism.

AWTW News Service first saw life in January 2003, at a critical juncture when under the banner of their global "war on terror" the US-led imperialists had launched and were expanding what was in fact a war for empire. After invading Afghanistan, they were preparing to invade Iraq. It was a time when a powerful people's war was surging forward in Nepal, led by revolutionaries who were participants in the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement. RIM gathered communists from around the world who, in the wake of the defeat of the revolution in China following the death of Mao Tsetung, banded together from the five continents to strengthen the struggle to do away with the capitalist system through revolution.

AWTW News Service was inspired by RIM, which based itself on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism (MLM). During the years since then, the news service untiringly exposed the crimes of the imperialists in many corners of the globe, bringing to light stories of popular resistance against oppression, analysing how all oppression was ultimately rooted in the system of capitalism-imperialism, and pointing to the need for the solution, revolution.

These past fourteen years have seen major developments, including the collapse of RIM itself. Not only are some of the forces previously united in RIM now sharply opposed to each other, the previous understanding of revolutionary communism itself has, to borrow Mao Zedong’s term, "divided into two". One strand of the old Maoism has wound up in a social-democratic liquidation of the core revolutionary principles of Marxism, exemplified tragically in the capitulation of the Maoist leadership in Nepal and the termination of the revolutionary war there. Others from the previous MLM movement are stuck in a dogmatist, religious-like upholding of sterile "Maoist" formulas that are equally devoid of revolutionary content. In opposition to this, Bob Avakian's new synthesis of communism has fully emerged, rescuing the scientific kernel of communism while criticizing and repudiating those secondary aspects in the past understanding and actions of communists that have actually gone against communism's liberatory nature. The result is that we now have a qualitatively more scientific framework for understanding the world and changing it through revolution, which is gaining adherents from among forces previously part of RIM as well as others more recently attracted to communism. (For more on RIM, its history, its collapse and the division of Maoism into two, see Communism: The Beginning of a New Stage – A Manifesto from the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA and Letter to Participating Parties and Organizations of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement by the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA.)

And how the world cries out for revolution! Everywhere inequality has intensified, women face the violent intensification of patriarchy and degradation, and whole states in parts of the Third World are written off as "failed" and left to rot. The hopes of millions worldwide that soared as US-backed dictators were toppled by mass uprisings in the “Arab Spring” were dashed with the re-consolidation of reactionary rule. War has ripped gaping wounds in the Middle East as the Western imperialists and their local allies contend with reactionary Islamic jihadists, trapping the masses in a vortex of terror and despair. Millions have been driven from their homes, and thousands drown in desperate attempts to cross the Mediterranean to safety – while those few who make it face ever higher walls erected by these same imperialists to keep them out, physical walls as well as the walls of hatred being whipped up against them. Now, after years of normalizing mounting levels of nationalist jingoism, racism and misogyny, the dynamics of this system have propelled the fascist Donald Trump into the post of commander-in-chief of US imperialism. This in turn is giving major impetus to fascist movements that have been steadily gnawing their way into the political mainstream of Europe – in Austria, Hungary and Poland, and now the Netherlands, France, Germany and elsewhere. Throughout the oppressed nations too, the rise of “strong men” like India's Modi, Turkey's Erdogan, Duterte in the Philippines and others, tells the same story: the post-World War 2 order is rapidly coming apart at the seams.

The most fundamental question facing humanity today is whether this great turmoil will give rise to the establishment of regimes that are far more repressive and reactionary than even those today, with an unprecedented intensification of oppression and inequality, the unleashing of war and famine, environmental catastrophe and potentially far worse, or whether the oppressed can be enabled to rise, led by a core of conscious revolutionaries, and dismantle the existing state apparatuses in key parts of the world and establish radically new state powers that begin to do away with all oppression and exploitation. This has everything to do with how well hundreds and thousands today can be armed with a scientific approach to reality and act on that basis. Today this means transforming AWTW News Service into one firmly based on Avakian's new communism, a task that is proudly being assumed by the communists who have been the driving force in it over these years – a task that you are being asked to join in, in countless ways: reposting, distributing, writing, reporting, debating and corresponding with it, to name but a few.

Articles are needed that lay bare how the source of every kind of oppression in every country is ultimately rooted in the capitalist-imperialist system, whether it be through analysing the coup d'etat in Turkey, the failure of the Syriza experiment in Greece, the rise of fascism in the US and Europe, etc.

The news service needs analysis that lays bare the major faultlines ripping through every class-divided society and propelling millions into questioning and resistance, to help increasing numbers make the leap from being fighters on one front against capitalist oppression to fighters on every front. To take just one example, it needs to highlight the many different ways that brave forces are stepping outside normal channels to resist the draconian measures being enacted against migrants, exposing how it is the capitalist-imperialist system that is driving immigration and clamping down on migrants. It has to help establish a powerful internationalist current around this burning issue – showing why and how it is essential that the "whole world comes first", rather than "what does this mean for me and my country" – so as to bridge borders between peoples, to change not only what people think but how they think, to train them in the communist line and outlook. Or, in relation to patriarchy, to bring out why you cannot break all the links in the chain of capitalist oppression except one, why leaving male supremacy unchallenged quickly opens the door to the strengthening of every form of division and inequality. All this is part of the process of "fighting the power and transforming the people, for revolution" – and not least of all, bringing forth a new generation of revolutionary leaders in this process, who can use this news service to help identify and bring together more revolutionary forces wherever they may be.

It is critical to expose the system and its institutions and structures, but it is also vital to put forward the solution, a new kind of state power and a new way of organising the society and economy to meet people's needs in the broadest, most liberating sense, and step-by-step enable people to make the transition, through revolution, to a whole new world of flourishing humanity, armed with critical thinking and free of the shackles of class, patriarchy and all social divisions and inequalities. To do this we need to take on and tear apart the reactionary verdict on revolution and socialism. Otherwise, our criticism of the existing system loses force and purpose. Furthermore, based on the new synthesis summation of the socialist experiences of the 20th century, we need to show the necessity, possibility and desirability of Avakian's re-envisaged socialist society – how it not only meets the basic needs of the people, but will be a vibrant society marked by an unprecedented flourishing of intellectual and cultural life.

Without BA's new communism and the understanding that has developed on the basis of his approach and method, even for those who have vital elements of understanding about how thoroughly rotten all that exists really is, it is difficult to understand that the world doesn't have to be the way it is, that the potential for a radically different way of living for all humanity lies entangled in today's web of contradictions that are driving society, trapping oppressed humanity in dog-eat-dog relations, and threatening unprecedented disasters. Avakian's visionary understanding of the goal of communism shows how that is not only possible, but an urgent necessity, crying out for action right now.

With this understanding as the solid foundation of the news service, its pages will be open to others who, from different perspectives and approaches, bring to the light of day otherwise hidden stories of resistance and opposition to the prevailing order, shed light on the crimes of the system and how it works, reveal the complexity of the forces at work, and do all this in a way that compels others to turn to this site as a vibrant hub of critical analysis and debate. To truly become a weapon for revolution in growing parts of the world, articles need to be shared, correspondence is needed, key articles translated into different languages, and more. To further this, the news service will rupture from its weekly edition format that has been more oriented to the print media epoch, and instead focus on releasing articles on the Web hot on the heels of major events in the world. We need contributions from all those able to help so that the now far too narrow scope of our articles, limited by our current abilities, can begin to better match the needs of what must necessarily be a global revolutionary process.

Hard truths need to be stated clearly from the outset: the strength of the forces worldwide fighting for communist revolution pales in comparison to the immense challenges before us. But it is an even more important truth that never before in history has there existed a clearer and more scientific understanding of the source of oppression and what is needed to do away with it. On this foundation, A World To Win News Service can and must become a powerful tool serving all those who long for an end to oppression and exploitation, drawing forward and training thousands and influencing millions in many countries around the world, hastening the day when humanity can break free of the shackles that have enchained it for all too long.